The European Commission’s Directorate-General for Defence, Industry and Space (DG-DEFIS) has issued a Prior Information Notice (PIN) for a planned call to address how the future evolution of European GNSS (EGNSS) could be beneficial for autonomous transportation. The new service contract shall assess the feasibility of an integrity service complementing EGNSS High Accuracy in the 2030+ timeframe.
The activities to be carried out shall analyse the feasibility of an integrity service complementing European GNSS (EGNSS) High Accuracy in the 2030+ timeframe on top of the current baseline of EGNSS services to feed the evolving needs in autonomous transport. This action serves to assess the respective merits of various directions for the Galileo and EGNOS services to evolve and to build roadmaps of the steps needed before the operational introduction of such new services.
More information about the Prior Information Notice and the contract notice publication can be found here.
Tailored premiums
Autonomous transportation (such as autonomous vehicles, ships or trains) is the future of the transport industry and has the potential to reduce human error, improve the efficiency of operations, and enable new uses and new applications. This will require operations to be at least as safe as the existing ones.
The European Commission is currently specifying the long-term evolution of the EGNSS programme, including new services for Galileo and EGNOS. The use of an integrity service complementing European GNSS High Accuracy in the 2030+ could result in the provision of an accurate and reliable positioning solution which would translate into the overall improvement of the future autonomous transportation systems.
Galileo is Europe’s Global Navigation Satellite System providing an accurate, guaranteed global positioning service under civilian control. Galileo is operational since the Initial Service declaration at the end of 2016. As part of the main services provided by Galileo, the Galileo High-Accuracy Service shall provide in the near future a high-accuracy positioning and synchronisation information.
EGNOS is the European Satellite-based Augmentation System (SBAS) and augments GPS L1 C/A civilian signal by providing corrections and integrity information for positioning and navigation applications over Europe. EGNOS version 3, will in the near future augment both GPS and Galileo constellations in the L1 and L5 bands and will extend the service area to the entire landmasses of EU Member States. New EGNOS services could be implemented in further releases of EGNOS as an option for the integrity service complementing EGNSS High Accuracy.